The [, a, s, k, ] keys on my keyboard are slowly getting worn out and I'm starting to wonder how effective adding these to my comments are in actually getting people to look into improving their posts. So I'm wondering if it would be possible to implement something that will stop them from posting again until they have at least scrolled to the bottom of this page - hopefully reading it as they go down.

My idea is simple, let us vote/flag users who would benefit from reading the [ask] page.

How I envision this working is that if a user receives N number of these votes in their last X posts (question or answer), then they must go to the ask page and scroll to the bottom before they are allowed to post again. If they continue to post bad content, and incur another N - 1 votes, they are required to repeat the process.

I mention scrolling to the bottom as I am not naive enough to think that ever user will actually read the ask page the first time they are asked. But I believe that the repeated and narrowing requests will actually eventually get through to the majority. In doing so, I would expect the level of quality of questions would improve and begin to breed good questions at a similar rate that bad questions seem to breed.

Example:

User receives 10 votes/flags in their last 3 posts

User gets notified that they must read how-to-ask or similar before posting again

New users do, in fact, have to click a checkbox at the bottom of the How to Ask page indicating that they understand what they just read, before they can post their first question.
– Robert HarveyNov 5 '15 at 8:12

@RobertHarvey - Sure and thats great :) I'm thinking more about repeat offenders or at least to reiterate that step for those that have just scrolled over it on the first asking
– SayseNov 5 '15 at 8:15

For a while I didn't notice that [a s k] spelled "ask" and I was wondering whether there was some new game that used WASD and k a lot... I think the user avatar primed me for thinking games.
– ryanyuyuNov 5 '15 at 13:46

1 Answer
1

Given the existence of the rate-limiting feature, I really don't see what we'd gain from the feature being suggested here. The user who repeatedly posts crap to the site will get rate-limited, which seems to me to be a much more substantial penalty than having to scroll a page.

Users who can be taught the SO ways will have a bigger incentive to learn these ways if the consequence of not learning these ways is a substantial one, like not being able to post for a while, than if they just have to go through the motions (scrolling down a page) to regain their ability to post.

Users who are not going to learn, are just not going to learn, no matter what. And those who would circumvent the rate-limiting feature by trying to create new accounts are going to do the same thing with the feature being proposed here.